1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to architectural structures and, more particularly, to architectural buildings, usually urban buildings, that are designed for both personal occupancy and automotive parking.
2. The Prior Art
Urban buildings increasingly suffer from insufficient adjacent or integrated parking facilities. Such parking facilities in recent years have taken various typical forms.
One type of conventional parking facility is an elevator garage in which an attendant drives a vehicle to be stored from an access level onto a single lift elevator, transports the vehicle along vertical columns and horizontal rows to an upper storage location, drives the vehicle from the lift to the storage location, and then returns to the access level. Retrieval requires these steps in reverse. Such elevator garages are costly to maintain because of the required number of elevator attendants and complexity of the equipment.
In another type of parking facility, parking is achieved by the driver himself, negotiating up or down ramps, and corridors until a level with an empty parking location is found, after which the driver leaves that level by stairway or elevator. Retrieval requires these steps in reverse. Such a drive-and-park garage requires a relatively large site to provide adequate room for the up and down ramps and corridors.
Many prior art elevator garages and drive-and-park garages suffer from the disadvantage that vehicles being parked must be kept running until finally stored, and vehicles that have been stored must be kept running while being retrieved. One prior art elevator system that does not suffer from this problem comprises vertically (not horizontally) movable elevators, each of which has a vertical array of levels, any given level communicating with an access level depending on the vertical location of the elevator. As will be explained below, this type of elevator has been found to have characteristics that lend themselves, when specifically designed, to the architectural structure of the present invention.